


reconfiguration of a sentence

by threadoflife



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Denial, Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, John is lost without Sherlock, M/M, Memories, Not a Happy Story, POV John Watson, POV Second Person, Post-Reichenbach, Pre and Post Reichenbach, refers only to Sherlock in TRF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 17:12:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7692769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threadoflife/pseuds/threadoflife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You should have known a lot of things, but denial is one of your worse qualities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. retrospective

**Author's Note:**

> Criticism is appreciated!

[…] I’ll be your  
slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue  
and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet  
was already there, like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time. 

_Wishbone_ , R. Siken

 

 

When you first joined the military, that was when your streak of should-have-knowns began. You should have known that Harry would completely collapse in your absence; that Major Sholto wouldn’t always be James, not after; that this one girl you were dating at the time wouldn’t wait for you. It was bound to happen sometime, somehow. These things did. Since it was a war you were fighting, you should’ve also known you’d be shot and be sent back with a limp, a malfunctioning hand, a scarred shoulder. The military lifted the fog of uselessness (because who was left if Harry didn’t need you anymore?) but you should have known. Should have known it wouldn’t last.

You didn’t.

You know now: how humans make up wondrous, fantastical, even impossible things, when they’re terrified, or happy, and want to be saved. (Terror and happiness are twins, a flower’s stalk and the head, incomplete without the other.) You didn’t know what you were, then, and it didn’t matter, except for how it made you invent one of those impossible things yourself. Afghanistan was your Neverland: you thought you’d gone there to never return.

Afghanistan and its dry, sweltering summers, its freezing winters, its endless nights. Its cramped quarters (sweat, noise, exposure)—its stretched, endless hours of boredom (card games, conversations about death over old pictures, hard cynicism)—its medical emergencies (blood and gore, losing lives in sunshine, futile words in the night)—and its warzones. God, the warzones, with its mindless gunfire like a lethal, ceaseless rainfall of bullets pattering down, and among that roar, the vibration of the earth underneath, quaking on in your body, and the silence, the silence of screaming mouths muted in the storm that was loudest when the noise was over.

You, in the middle of this all—you, in the middle of your Neverland. You never functioned better, never excelled anywhere else as much as there. Sometimes, you remembered hearing somewhere that one man’s utopia is another’s hell, and the thought was so absurd because it was so right that you wondered if maybe you just hadn’t gone insane in Afghanistan only because you arrived there insane already. You don’t know what you were, (in)sane or (un)happy, but whatever you were, it worked.

You didn’t just exist: you _lived_. You only knew the difference between these things once the first broken soldier body was under your hands in a foreign country.

At least you thought that was what it meant to live.

So when the thing happened that you should’ve known would happen (but didn’t know), of course it left you behind worse than before Afghanistan. Afghanistan, in all its death, had been your life, the only life you thought you ever wanted to live. So when you came back crippled, you should have known you’d end up wanting to eat your gun instead of an apple for breakfast.

You didn’t go to Afghanistan because you wanted to die. Not because of Queen and country either—God, no. The shameful truth was that you went there because you were bored. Life was boring. Nothing happened to you, and each day that you got up and ate and studied and met people and got older seemed stupid, nonsensical, was just another day waiting to die. You like to think you’re a somewhat good man, a man with morals, but there’s a darker side to you, isn’t there? There is. You don’t like to look at it, but those who know to read shadows can read in yours that you went to Afghanistan to feel useful—to be needed. You are somewhat smart, (were) a doctor with steady hands: someone would surely need you down there, so you went. It was practical. They needed you, and you need to be needed. In your selfishness you were selfless, in your selflessness you were selfish. You were looking for life in a place where people died.

So you didn’t go to Afghanistan to die. If it had happened, though—it wouldn’t have mattered either, would it?

Not back then.

The part where it mattered came much later.

*

It was just after you were in therapy. 

Your therapist, Ella, liked to talk about the wrong things, all the time.

They were wrong to you, of course; to Ella, they were right. She was working within the official parameters of therapeutic practice, the regulations according to which all of humanity ostensibly functioned. She liked to assume that every man and woman (and all those in between) could be put into the neat little drawers of categorisations of the DSM chest of drawers. She worked liked that. Well, nearly every human worked like that. It was just funny—because, as much doctors were told not to judge after appearance, they did it all the time. They were just human, of course, and you did it too, from time of time. But Ella, oh, Ella reveled in that. She took a look at you (and two and three and four and five and many more) and saw what you were made of when you first came to her: a poor bloke. So mentally fucked over he couldn’t even walk properly, needed a crutch. Dangerous weight loss, visible even through his jumpers. Mood swings. Depressed. Couldn’t bring himself to look for work, showed no interest in recreational activities, slept little, ate even less. Didn’t like talking about himself. Repressed. Trust issues. Isolation: not the passive accidental kind, but rather the active kind; intentional; self-isolation.

Had nightmares.

That was what she saw: a disillusioned war veteran, crippled, with an imaginary leg wound and a shoulder that was shot through, hobbling into the room on a crutch.

Textbook.

That was why she looked at you patiently when you said, “Yeah, another nightmare,” and proceeded to speak to you in a gentle, calm voice, as if she’d spook you by saying a wrong word. It was funny, see, because she never asked what you felt then, after a nightmare. She just looked at you staring wordlessly back at her with bags underneath your eyes like bruises and assumed the nightmare messed you up, left you sweaty, shaken, and haunted. She assumed it was a flashback. And—well—yes. Yes, it did, and yes, it was. It were flashbacks of the war, people dying like mayflies, dropping dead too early, too brutally. Gunfire like hard arsenic rain. These flashbacks did leave you sweaty, shaken, and haunted. But she never asked what you felt after you woke up. She’d have expected verbal descriptors like, “God, the dead haunt me,” and “I couldn’t save that kid,” and “why was it him and not me,” and “I dream of blood,” or the like.

It was something you couldn’t give her.

Just as well Ella never asked. If you’d said you missed the war for reasons different than the ones she imagined, she might have put you somewhere you definitely didn’t want to be. She wouldn’t have understood, would probably have classified you within the psychopathic area, if not as an outright psychopath. You aren’t a psychopath, though, you’re pretty sure of that.

After all, didn’t you go to therapy after the war like a good little veteran? Because it’s what you did. You experienced traumatic events; you were unable to cope; so you go to therapy. Everyone assumed you’d had traumatic events, were unable to cope, so you went to therapy. You did what everyone did, you almost always did. You were normal.

God, you fucking loathed being normal, if it meant this. Which was funny, really: you thought about this, loathing normalcy, as you took care to dress plainly in jumpers, to speak mildly, to remain inconspicuous. 

Weren’t you just a messed up package? No wonder you were in therapy. 

*

You weren’t in therapy for long. Your miracle was waiting for you: you wrote, “Nothing happens to me,” in your blog, and a while after it happened. 

*

The first time Sherlock Holmes looked at you, he didn’t look at you.

As he likes to say, “You see, but you don’t observe.” He, however, did it the other way around: he observed you, but he did not see. For a man of such a massive intellect, Sherlock is quite ignorant, not just about things like the solar system but things of a larger scale, too. He observes so much and yet is ignorant to so many obvious things, some of which are things everyone else can see clearly, easily. Sherlock’s ignorance in these things is as deep as the sky is wide, sometimes. 

Just like the first time he looked at you, he didn’t _look_ at you. Oh, he saw Afghanistan, saw all the fractures of your body and the broken mechanisms of your mind (brilliant, that. Amazing.) but what he didn’t see was your shadow. Your shadow with the gun in a steady hand and a hard heart and a clean shot through two windows. He didn’t see that, and it got him to look at you a second time, really look. He rewrote and adjusted previously accumulated data and seemed satisfied with that new data, so satisfied indeed that he decided he’d be able to stand having you around, that you weren’t quite as boring as everyone else.

The point is, before you needed your second miracle, Sherlock looked at you. Twice. One was: _invalided army doctor recently returned from Afghanistan, psychosomatic limp, you’ll do, the address is 221B Baker Street, afternoon._ Two was what you like to think of as a mutually breathless moment that dissolved into inappropriate laughter at a crime scene over a bloody awful cabbie; it was Sherlock saying, “Dinner?” (but not "let’s have dinner") and you going home and writing, in not so many words, about how Sherlock happened to you. Your miracle, though you didn’t call it like this at that time.

Twice, Sherlock looked at you, the first time he decided you’d do as a flatmate, the second time he decided you’d do as the blogger to his detective.

And that was that.

After that, Sherlock didn’t look at you anymore.

*

Even when Sherlock wasn’t looking at you anymore, and possibly because you were always a bit too stupid for a doctor and never had any sense of self-preservation whatsoever (and they all lied to you, common sense didn’t come with age), you looked at him instead. 

Yes, back then, post miracle one, you were always looking. Consciously, unconsciously, it didn’t make a difference. It didn’t have a rhythm, didn’t have a set time, didn’t have a trigger. You lived with him at 221B, you shared everything from toast to tea to a bathroom (and a blanket, on one memorable occasion), so of course you were bound to look at him.

Cases were a major cause for you to look. When you were going through hard times—no cases, Sherlock’s phone persistently, stubbornly silent—and what seemed like a promising client would finally drop by, that’d be the start of many looks. Sherlock on his knees in debris—Sherlock stretching on his toes to reach somewhere high—Sherlock crouching to look underneath a sink—Sherlock exploring a crime scene—when you weren’t off checking something he told you to check, you stayed right at his side and looked at him looking about. It was always fascinating to watch. Or Sherlock concentrating on the sofa with his palms pressed flat together beneath his chin, consulting his mind palace—you let him be, read the newspaper or watched the telly, but you periodically looked at him, to make sure he was still breathing. He’s frequently still and quiet when he thinks. It took you a while to learn that his silence is deceptive, sometimes.

You remember the case with the missing granddaughter. It was an affair that had led to an energetic chase through the woods after thirty-four hours of sleeplessness and a furious mother caught kidnapping her own daughter. Sherlock knelt on the floor of the abandoned shack untying the ropes from around the girl’s wrist, already rambling out his deductions in his rapid-fire, incredible way. You remember looking up from checking the girl’s pupils with a flashlight over her head to stare at Sherlock. His face, you remember, had been cast in heavy shadows; it had been night, and the mother had left her daughter with only two gas lamps. They reconfigured Sherlock’s face as deep smudgy valleys, the cant of his cheekbones harsher through the dirt smeared underneath, the lack of sleep in the half circles beneath his eyes like pale blue bruises. There was a cut on his lower lip from the mother’s hand, and his hair, sweaty, stuck to his forehead.

Against that canvas of restless exhaustion, his eyes: intense, lit, and alive. His mouth was shaping itself rapidly around words that went completely past you; you were much more occupied by a sudden thought in your head: that it hurt to look at him. And it did hurt, a kind of hurt that sat in a tight, breathless space in your throat. It wasn’t the first time you felt it; it had started with you kneeling on a dirty floor in a Brixton flat and Sherlock standing above you talking about dirty wedding rings and damp coat collars, and since then, it happened every now and then. But that was okay. It wasn’t alarming. Surely they all stared like you did. Long; intense; helplessly—unable to look away. Sherlock is brilliant. Of course you stared. How could you not look at him, when he is like that? Sherlock is like a solar eclipse, all that brilliance hidden behind so much dark. His presence alone is demanding to be stared at. 

Those case-moments were a major cause for you to look, yes—but it didn’t stop there. Sherlock is a show, one you couldn’t help but see, no matter how often you’d seen it before, and one you couldn’t help but applaud, cheer for. Yet even when the show was over, you couldn’t stop staring.

There were other moments, smaller ones. Sort of case-moments, but not really.

For example, after the missing-granddaughter case, you got to a cab. You were staring out your respective windows throughout the drive home, each of you deep in thought. The silence in the car was pleasant, companionable in the way it only can be when two people share each other’s spaces as unapologetically and comfortably as you did. Even though the case had been a mere five, you knew Sherlock would sleep that night. You knew it from the way he slouched low in the seat, knew it from the way his legs were spread ever so slightly. Normally he sits properly, spine straight and chin up, but a successful case unwinds him. This one did. You saw it, saw his slouch and lazy legs—you watched his reflection in the window. Your own was smiling, but you didn’t know that. You weren’t looking at yourself, after all.

There was nothing specifically big or showy about the way he pulled off his coat at home, either, not the way he dressed himself in it just before a case; after a case, there were no big moments, no big looks anymore to be had. Still you watched, still your gaze lingered—stumbling after him into your flat, hesitating just inside the doorway to watch him as he shrugged off his coat. You looked at him whirl around in a circle around himself in that way he has as he threw the coat onto his seat carelessly and began to unbutton his suit to bare the crisp (still clean) white shirt underneath. His movements were swift and oddly elegant, as they always are. 

You stood there, watched him do it. You needed to make sure he wasn’t falling over himself in his exhaustion. This case had been thirty-four hours of insomnia after all, especially for Sherlock, and while he could go even longer without sleep, you liked to have an eye on him anyway. By then it was more about habit than anything else.

You watched him unbutton his suit until he stood there in his pressed trousers and white shirt before you pulled off your own jacket, and there was nothing strange about it. You sometimes did that. He let you. It didn’t matter, it was more about habit than anything else, so you let it slide.

What you also let slide were moments such as:

—at night. The tea a satisfying temperature in your throat; Mrs Hudson’s roast a nice weight in your stomach. The fire warm in the fireplace. Before the window: back to you, Sherlock, his tall, slender form framed by the dim light filtering in from the street. Holding the violin. Playing: the notes sweet, heavy, full of sentiment. Sherlock’s movements smooth, practiced, captivating. Sometimes, a glimpse of his face, closed eyes, lashes on his cheekbones.

You: on the sofa, silent, unmoving. Your eyes on Sherlock over the edge of the newspaper, the fire of the fireplace reflected within.

—late afternoon. After work, coming home, the rain going crazy outside. A taxing, boring day, taxing because boring. Stumbling up the stairs, through a door. Stopping. Before you: Sherlock sitting at the kitchen table staring into his microscope, wearing a purple shirt. His neck against it very pale. His hand on the adjustment knob, long fingers steady.

You: in the doorway. Looking at Sherlock looking at his microscope, for a long moment, you in your wet clothes that were clinging, before finally leaving to change clothes.

—the middle of the day. Mrs Hudson, bless her persistent soul, managing to shove scones under your noses. Before you: Sherlock, wrinkling his nose but finally deigning to take a bite and losing his supercilious expression upon doing so. His face unfolding in: wrinkles smoothing, eyes briefly losing their focus, lips parting. 

You: for precisely two seconds, unaware. Watching Sherlock take the first bite, the pleasure on his face, the scone in your own hand forgotten.

—other such innumerable moments scattered throughout; all of these, Baker Street, 221B, the two of you together.

You looked at him so often the number of times you did escaped you. You didn’t count them. It was easily more than fifty-seven. Definitely more than Sherlock’s two.

You should’ve known you shouldn’t have done it, but you and Sherlock replayed a motif as old as anything: Tantalus and the fruit, Icarus and the sun. You get too close, you burn yourself.

But the point was, see, that you would never have burnt yourself: Sherlock was the fruit and you were Tantalus, and Sherlock was always out of reach, always—just— _so_ —out of reach.

You were safe this way. 

Yes, you were safe.

*

That was what you thought.

*

If Ella had ever asked you what you felt after nightmares, this is what she would’ve got: _I feel so useless, just sitting around doing nothing. Nothing happens to me. There’s no purpose. No one needs me. I can’t do anything._

_I feel so useless here I want to eat my gun. I miss Afghanistan. God, I fucking miss it. I want to go back. I want to be alive again._

You never said these words, though, even to yourself. Before Sherlock, when you were still living in the bedsit, when you got up in the morning the first thing you did was exercising self-control: you staunchly took a shower, got dressed, brushed your teeth, prepared your tea and got an apple from the fridge—both of which you then proceeded to ignore—and after that you slowly opened the chest of drawers, took out your laptop and placed it on the table. Then, and only then, you returned to the chest of drawers to gaze at the illegal gun you kept, and that was all you did: looking. For a long while, and calmly.

This was the part where you thought _I want to eat it_ , but you never verbalised it. You never even explicitly said these words inside your own head. You pictured it, though. You had a clear idea of how it would go. You’d get black clothes, lay out the shower with plastic tarpaulins—glue it to the tiled walls too; much easier to clean—wear your dog tags to help ease the identification process in a post-mortem gesture of help, and then you’d do it. This is what happened inside your head when you looked at your gun in the morning just after waking up, for a long while, and calmly, and it were only pictures, never words. There was something more appealing about pictures, something more intrinsic that had to do with your gut, but you couldn’t—well, you couldn’t name it. No surprise, there. Maybe you just didn’t verbalise this part because you weren’t good at naming things. 

You’d been really messed up, then. No wonder you were ready to taste the metal of your gun.

But you never got around to trying that out, see, because then you met Sherlock Holmes.

*

The worst were the moments in between, moments

—whenever. 

T a p, your fingers on the keyboard, t a p, t a p, t a p, slowly, t a p, and you thought about the next sentence, about synonyms, about syntax, and you breathed in, and then you paused, a last t a p—

and it was a day like any other, a day without a case, and you raised your head to turn it to the right without conscious thought; you turned it to the right so your eyes could find Sherlock. Sherlock was in his chair, a foot or two away from you, reading an obscure book, completely still and silent.

His head was bent slightly as he read, which probably gave him a double chin. (It always did.) (It was oddly charming.) Underneath his messy hair, the tips of his ears showed. Just above the fabric of his dressing gown, a bit of his hair peaked out.

You looked at him like that, on an ordinary day like this on which he was sharing your space, your time, your existence. You looked at him like that. You looked because you needed to make sure that he was still there. You looked because sometimes you just did. You looked because of no reason. You looked because sometimes you just needed to.

You thought about words again, and of all things you thought of ‘vulnerable.’ Vulnerable, Sherlock, his hair like that, escaping the collar of his dressing gown in a stray curl or two. You had a vivid thought just then of going over and taking that hair in between your thumb and index finger to tuck it back inside so it would be safe. The idea made something tug sharply in your stomach the way danger does, the way death does—hot—electric—threatening, in the best and worst of ways.

The next word was simply ‘yes.’

You didn’t know what to do with that, so you just kept breathing: you inhaled slowly through your nose and let it out again just as slowly through your mouth. Your fingers were still raised slightly above the keys of your keyboard, frozen mid-air. In that moment, it seemed they’d never touch the keyboard again.

You just kept breathing for a while, looking at the back of Sherlock’s pale neck and his dark hair.

Sometime later an inhalation turned rather tremulous, and when you noticed it, you sat up rather quickly rather stiffly. You jerked your head in a single nod, told yourself to get a grip and turned your eyes back on your laptop to keep writing.

The sentence was a variety of ‘Sherlock’ and ‘I’ and ‘this,’ and you remembered syntax. Like a tide pulled in, your eyes were back on Sherlock again in no time, and you thought—

—you thought that if anything ever were to consist only of the words ‘Sherlock,’ ‘I,’ and ‘this,’ the rest was inconsequential. No matter how these three words would be put together in a sentence—those three words, together or untogether as long as they remained in the same sentence structure, would be enough. It didn’t matter, you suddenly realised. For the first time in your life it simply didn’t matter at all, whatever came after: adventure, silence, case, boredom, killing. It didn’t matter. Even if this was a horrifyingly domestic moment, there was no urge to sign up for military and war; for once, there was no gaping, nonsensical, mad emptiness that needed to be filled in whatever half-suicidal manner available.

For once, you were happy, like this. You were happy, and there was no need to be doing anything else, anywhere else. You were John Watson, typing up a story at your laptop, and not two feet away from you was a brilliant, charming madman, reading something you likely wouldn’t ever understand, and everything was just right the way it was. As if it was always meant to be this one way, John Watson and Sherlock Holmes in a living room existing side by side—John Watson looking at Sherlock Holmes for no reason all, which was every reason.

The shock in your stomach receded a little. It grew warm instead of blistering, comfortable instead of painful. You could live with that, you thought. You wanted to live with that—in adventure or domesticity, it didn’t matter: and that was a revelation, because you’d never thought something like that before; you’d always chased death, never wanted to chase life. Not really. Not until now.

And even if it would never be more—that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want you back. Well, it mattered quietly, desperately, sometimes, yes, but in the long run—you were satisfied like that. You could have gone the rest of your life like that. You’d always be hungry, you’d always be lacking, but god, it wasn’t the same as Afghanistan anymore, couldn’t be—nothing could be, not after Sherlock.

And that was it, wasn’t it. Your whole life, you’d just been waiting for Sherlock to happen.

And in whatever shape he happened, you’d take him and you’d love him, because it felt like that was what you were meant to do.

_As long as there is Sherlock, I, and this. Whatever this is._

One last look at Sherlock, another nod to yourself—unconscious and much slower than the last—and your fingers came down to write again, and t a p, and t a p, and t a p...

*

There were more of these moments. They all grew together, tiny pieces that shaped into something bigger, until it was so big it threatened to suffocate you.

Because suddenly, this mattered.

Sherlock mattered.

And then the gun in your hand had an entirely different purpose but for your mouth.


	2. now

In retrospect, this is something you should have known too, of course: you weren’t safe.

You should’ve known it was too good to be true, Sherlock happening just as if he’d heard you. You hadn’t addressed him at all—you hadn’t even known he existed—but then there he’d been, sitting still in a lab room of St Bart’s as if he’d been waiting for you.

As if he’d heard you.

Yeah, you’d always been a romantic. It’s one of your more horrid traits, along with denial. 

Just how little Sherlock had been waiting for you really, and how little he’d been hearing you, had come clear later, in the same place, on a roof.

But you are getting ahead of yourself. It’s not time for that yet.

For now, it’s 5:42 in the morning, and you sit at the table in a new flat that is not 221B, and you are thinking of these things. Things before, and not what Sherlock—what he did. Not the roof. No, the roof comes later, when it is night, or early evening, and you can fall apart in the darkness. There is a time and a place for things like falling apart, and the falling apart you do comes in two ways: the gradual kind, which is happening during the day when it is bright outside, a cancerous rot slowly spreading until it’s consumed you. The other is the big kind, reserved for the time when it is dark outside, and you feel less foolish drinking more alcohol than is wise, less foolish punching walls, less foolish muttering, “Stop being dead,” to yourself because yourself is the only person you’re talking to these days besides Sherlock.

But if Sherlock left you with something it’s irregularity. You can’t even do the falling apart properly anymore. 

When the hand of the clock moves on to 5:43, your own hand moves up to shadow your eyes, and it is sudden night. Because it is sudden night, the heaving of your chest and the quaking of your shoulders are okay things to happen. 

It’s 5:43 in the morning. The entire day is ahead of you.

How are you going to survive this?

Nobody can return from the dead. Nobody can be both the cause for the need of a second miracle and its solution.

How are you going to survive this?

From underneath your hand, you can see the table through blurred eyes, on which a wrinkled piece of paper—which you’d crumpled up and thrown somewhere on the floor the previous night in a fit of desperation only to look for it in the morning so you could smooth it out again—shows this:

> ~~Sherlock~~
> 
> ~~this~~
> 
> I


End file.
